Falling into the exoteric light

This photograph is not about technology in isolation. It isn’t even really about screens. It’s about a drift — a slow, almost invisible movement away from inner substance and toward an exterior world that has become increasingly loud, saturated, and flat.

The figure in the image appears to be falling, or perhaps merging, into a field of artificial light. There is no violence in it. No struggle. The posture is almost calm. And that, to me, is the most unsettling part. It reflects how easy it has become to surrender interior life without noticing it has gone.

We often talk about consumer culture as something we participate in, but rarely as something that consumes us in return. Attention is constantly drawn outward — to images, trends, news, transactions, performances. We observe, we scroll, we compare, we react. And in doing so, we begin to live more and more through observation rather than experience. The world becomes something we look at, rather than something we inhabit.

This doesn’t only happen online. It extends into the physical world — into cities, routines, even nature. People walk through forests without hearing them. Sit by water without feeling it. Stand beneath vast skies and register nothing beyond the surface impression. Everything becomes visualised, flattened, processed. The senses dull. Presence thins.

What emerges is a collective state — not enforced, but accepted. A hive of habits, opinions, fashions, behaviours. The internet is often described as a web, and that metaphor feels accurate: it connects, supports, cushions — but it also subtly restricts movement. It encourages alignment. Stepping away from it can feel like social disappearance, even threat. Difference unsettles a system built on sameness.

The image also speaks to a deeper aesthetic loss. Not just beauty in the decorative sense, but representation. The way people once used appearance, style, and craft to express essence — who they were, what they stood for, how they wished to exist in the world. Today, clothing and presentation feel increasingly generic, driven by availability rather than intention. Saturation replaces meaning. When everything is colourful, nothing stands out. The result is a strange grey — not from lack, but from excess.

Even subcultures blur into one another. Fashion no longer evolves so much as it mutates endlessly, becoming either absurdly inaccessible or utterly disposable. What should be expressive becomes uniform. Individuality is spoken about constantly, yet rarely embodied. Ego remains, but it detaches from depth and becomes collective — a false ego built from consumer identity, validation loops, and surface-level performance.

And yet, paradoxically, selfishness increases. People become more self-focused while having less self. More defensive, less reflective. Assertive without inward grounding. It is a confusion of extremes.

This photograph is not an attack on people. It is a quiet confrontation with the system that has shaped them — a system that rewards compliance, discourages stillness, and treats introspection as inefficiency. A system that pulls attention outward until the inner fire is neglected, untended, forgotten.

The figure here is not evil, weak, or ignorant. They are simply absorbed. Living a preset life. Moving through templates of existence. Going around and around, busy but hollow. A dystopia not imposed by force, but entered willingly, because it feels normal, comfortable, even safe.

What pains me is not that humanity has advanced — but that in doing so, it has forgotten how to look back, and how to look within. We live in an age of unprecedented capability, yet profound disconnection from substance, history, craft, and meaning. From the long arc of how we became who we are.

This image does not offer solutions. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t moralise. It simply holds up a moment and asks a quiet question:

At what point does participation become disappearance?

At what point does watching replace being?

If there is any resistance left, it may not look like rebellion. It may look like remembrance. Like tending the inner fire again. Like choosing depth in a world that prefers surface. Like standing still long enough to feel the wind, the body, the warmth of something real.

That, perhaps, is enough to begin with.